It’s time for a treatise on pets. They’ve been mentioned in despatches occasionally in my Facebook musings and the occasional atrocity has been described and pictures published but it’s now time for an in-depth investigation. What has prompted this, you ask? It’s all about a rug and then some. Apparently “and then some” was a phrase Kurt Vonnegut used a lot – he wrote Slaughterhouse Five. I learnt this from a National Lampoon magazine parody of great English language writers not from an analysis of his writing style. But I digress.
The rug in question is a beautiful Turkish piece that the child bride and I bought in Turkey, funnily enough. In fact it’s one of two we bought in Kusadasi on a trip some years back. We didn’t want to hang them on the wall and make the place look like a Middle Eastern brothel because being rather expensive and hand-made they are quite durable so we put them where one normally puts rugs – on the floor.
In the picture above you can see an opening on the right which is the doorway into the laundry. On the other side of the laundry wall are located not one but two litter trays. These are placed there for the cats’ convenience however one of the cats has decided that he doesn’t like grit in his furry hobbit-like feet so he occasionally craps on the rug. I am sure this is also to keep us on our toes such that when we stagger downstairs first thing in the morning to give the cats their breakfast (also located in the laundry) we have to watch where we step. Hence the first order of business (if you’ll excuse the pun) is to stand and stare at the rug until the morning’s booby trap has been located if there is indeed one there. It took me three stares one morning before I saw the offending bratwurst. If you want to know what that’s like imagine doing a Where’s Wally puzzle when you’re half pissed.
Now in that photo there is a cat crap somewhere and I defy you to find it. I’ve forgotten where it is and I can’t find it. Top left I think.
Cats are considered to be fastidiously clean because they lick themselves constantly. What this means is that they swallow a lot of their own hair and occasionally it comes up the same way it went down in the shape of a fur ball. And cats will chunder where they stand which is what we woke up to this morning. We regularly wake up to last night’s dinner spread all over the floor or dripping down the back of a chair because the cat couldn’t be bothered getting off the dining room table.
Charlie the small white dog on the other hand, will demand to be let outside and he’ll bounce around like a pogo stick if he really needs to go outside. He may be a veritable crapping machine but he knows where the convenience is – anywhere outside.
The most alarming thing about cats is that they epitomise the old saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They fight each other regularly although it rarely escalates to a full on biting, scratching death tangle because one’s a bully (Ed) and the other one (Kaos) isn’t. The bully is big and slow and the other is small and agile so spends quality time under chairs which are no-go zones for Ed of the ponderous bulk.
Ed and Charlie on the other hand have lived an inter-species truce for the past year or so except for the past few months where Ed has taken to stalking Charlie and literally boxing him when he least expects it, like when they are seemingly innocently walking past each other. Of course Charlie recognises that he has to stand up for canine pride so the occasional biff from Ed degenerates into sound and fury. This is where the enemy thing comes in. If Charlie and Ed are in a blue, Kaos charges in and blind-sides Charlie in a neat pincer movement. So the poor little bugger is being punched in the head from all directions.
I challenge anyone to attempt to break that up with anything other than a broom or if one isn’t handy, a foot. I reached into one of these altercations a while back and months later we were still finding blood spatters in odd places after a vein on the back of my hand was opened by a razor sharp cat claw.
If we didn’t lock the cats outside and Charlie inside when we go out, God knows what we’d come home to. We love Charlie but look forward to the day David gets his own place and moves out with his dog. Unfortunately, the preferred living option at the moment is right across the road from us so during working hours we would be right back where we started. Not to worry.